My Sweet Valentine (25 page)
‘That wouldn’t do at all. Not somewhere decent like this.’
The man was obviously trying to be friendly but Olive couldn’t take to him. It wasn’t just that his manner was unpleasantly ingratiating, there was also the feeling that he was making fun of her. Mocking her. Not taking her seriously.
‘Mr King, the owner of the house—’ she began firmly, but once again the man interrupted her.
‘Oh, yes, we know Mr King. Sent us round here to sort this out, he did. You don’t need to worry yourself about anything, missus. You can leave everything to us.’
He was turning away from her, not wanting to have her hanging around interrupting their work, Olive suspected, but just as she was about to walk on to Mr Whittaker’s she saw Barney coming down the hallway of the house towards the still open front door. When he saw her the boy stopped dead, flashing her an uncertain look.
‘Hello, Barney,’ Olive smiled. ‘No school today?’
‘No, they aren’t having any lessons today on account of the bombs,’ Barney told her.
Olive knew that many of the schools did have to close after heavy bombing raids. ‘I suppose you’ve come to see what’s going on, have you?’ he asked him with a friendly smile.
‘He’s helping us out, aren’t you, Barney lad,’ the workman told her.
Olive smiled again, then continued on her way to the end house to see Mr Whittaker. Privately she didn’t think she’d have wanted Barney hanging around with them if he were her child. Apart from anything else, the two boys with the man were much older than Barney. Barney himself had obviously been embarrassed and uncomfortable, and Olive wondered if he actually was genuinely off school or if he had simply decided to take the day off. Whatever the case, it wasn’t her business and it wasn’t her place to say anything to the Dawsons either, she decided, all too conscious of how Nancy and her interest in what Barney was doing was viewed by Mrs Dawson in particular. Yet she was concerned about Barney, and she knew instinctively that no matter how soft-hearted Mrs Dawson might be with the boy, Archie Dawson would not approve of him hanging around with the kind of people Olive had seen.
Having pegged out her washing before taking Mr Whittaker’s dinner down to him – even though she knew that later in the day she would be bringing it back in still damp and smelling of smoke, and then trying to get it aired in the kitchen – Olive was on her way back from the bread shop where she’d had to queue for well over half an hour before she’d been able to buy a couple of loaves.
Walking briskly to ward off the cold, and refusing to look at the gaping empty spaces where, before the weekend, buildings had been, Olive paused briefly outside the vicarage. She could have done with a chat over a cup of tea with Audrey Windle – there was something about
Audrey’s kind, calm manner that was wonderfully comforting – but she knew that her friend would be busy with her own household and parish duties.
The ring of a bicycle bell behind her as she turned into Article Row had her turning round, to find Archie Dawson peddling swiftly towards her.
‘You didn’t see anything of Barney this morning did you, Olive?’ he asked, so brisk and obviously concerned that she didn’t have time to feel self-conscious.
‘As a matter of fact I did,’ she told him as he brought his cycle to a halt and placed one foot on the pavement. ‘I saw him at lunchtime when I took Mr Whittaker his dinner. He was with two older boys and a man who looked like their father and who was doing some repair work on number 49.’
Archie Dawson sighed heavily and adopted a worried frown.
‘Is everything all right?’
‘Tall and thickset, with sandy hair and a shifty look about them, were they, these lads?’ he asked.
‘Well, yes,’ Olive was forced to admit. Adding, ‘I did think that they seemed much older than Barney for them to be proper friends.’
‘They’re part of a gang he used to run around with before he came to us. Only took him up because he was small enough to get through scullery windows for them.’
Olive’s shocked look had Archie Dawson reaching out to pat her on her arm.
‘It’s all right. Luckily Barney told me what they wanted from him before they could get him into trouble. He’s a good lad, Barney is, but you know what kids are like:
always looking for an older kid to look up to and, boys being boys, they always seem to pick the ones that have got a bit of a swagger and that about them. The Farleys certainly have that. Full of it, they are, and a thoroughly bad lot to boot, the whole lot of them. They’ve got a reputation for being quick on the scene when a house gets bombed, picking over whatever there is to be picked over and helping themselves. The two lads you saw with Barney have an older brother who’s in prison at the moment and half a dozen cousins who probably should be, or have been at some time. And their father and his brothers are just as bad. It’s the old man, their grandfather, who runs the family. A real sharp card, he is, and not above doing a bit of blackmail if he thinks it will get him what he wants. Well known to us down at the station, all of them. Barney might be from a rough family but they weren’t thieves. What were they doing on Article Row, I’d like to know?’
‘Well, they said that they were working for Mr King, and that they’d come to repair the damage done by Saturday night’s bombs.’
‘That could be true. They’re slippery characters, and they run a bit of a salvage and general maintenance business that seems to be legitimate, but if you were to ask me I’d say it was just a cover for their real business of thieving. Proving that, though, is another matter. I’ve warned Barney about keeping away from them and I’ve explained why to him, because you can be sure that it won’t be one of them that ends up in trouble when there’s someone else they can put the blame on. Not that I think that Barney would deliberately do anything wrong, but he misses his dad. Talks about him all the time. Poor
little tyke.’ Archie craned his neck and peered down the road through the smoke. ‘There’s no sign of anyone outside number 49, but I’d better get down there and check. Thanks, Olive.’
As she watched him cycle off, Olive hoped that he would be able to save Barney from the influence of the boys she’d seen him with earlier.
‘Goodness, this place is busy,’ Sally pronounced as the four girls squeezed round their table in the packed Corner House teashop.
‘I expect everyone’s thinking like we are that they want to get back home early in case there’s an air raid,’ Agnes offered, giving Tilly an anxious look as she asked her, ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
‘I’m fine,’ Tilly assured her. And she was, because sitting discreetly several tables away was Drew, who had met her from work and escorted her here, and who would be walking them all home afterwards.
‘Well, if you was to ask me I’d say that coming here was a daft idea, Agnes,’ Dulcie put in her two penny-worth, ‘especially when we could all have gone home to number 13 and had a proper decent tea there that would have cost us nothing.’
‘Agnes was right to suggest that we had a get-together, Dulcie,’ Sally stuck up for the other girl. ‘We’ve all become so busy in our own lives that we hardly get time to talk together any more, even though we live under the same roof.’
‘Talk? What is there to talk about? You make it sound as though we’re ruddy politicians or summat, Sally. Me, I’d rather spend me free time doing something that’s
more fun than yacking. And where’s that nippy we gave our order?’
‘Nippy’ was the name given to the neatly dressed waitresses who worked in the Lyons Corner House teashops, women trained to deliver the most speedy service there was to be had. Lyons teashops were, after all, patronised by the working public of the country, people who wanted a decent meal served in double-quick time so that they could get back to the important business of serving their country. Of course, it was also patronised by plenty of people – friends, families, couples – who came in for one of its famous pots of tea and perhaps a piece of toast or, if they were lucky, a teacake, to be lingered over whilst they shared their special time together.
In one corner a pianist was playing a cheerful polka although there was no room for anyone to dance. Dulcie tapped her foot in time to it until she spied something that had her half standing up in outrage.
‘Just look at that. I knew it,’ she declared to the other girls. ‘That ruddy nippy who took our order is serving them two Free French men in uniform before us even though we gave our order first. ’Ere, you …’ she called out loudly.
Agnes cringed back in her seat whilst Sally gave a firm tug on Dulcie’s arm.
‘What is it?’ an older waitress demanded, suddenly appearing at their table.
‘That nippy,’ Dulcie began, but Sally shushed her and spoke over her to say calmly, ‘We seem to have been waiting a long time for our order.’
‘Well, what did you order?’ the waitress demanded.
‘Three of us ordered egg on toast and one of us ordered sardines.’
‘Well, that’s it then,’ the waitress sniffed. ‘It’s the sardines. Run out of them, we have.’
‘But I’ve just seen our nippy taking two plates of them to those soldiers,’ Dulcie began angrily.
‘Well, that will be on account of them having come in earlier to order them. Regular customers, they’ll be. So now, miss, if you’d like to choose something else from the menu …?’
‘I’ll have the eggs, like everyone else,’ Dulcie told her, her glower deepening when one of the French soldiers, who had obviously overheard the row, raised his teacup to her and gave her a wicked smile.
‘Bloody French,’ Dulcie swore. ‘Just look at them. You’d never think that they’d given in to Hitler, would you, the way they strut around London?’
‘Not all of them, Dulcie,’ Tilly protested.
There were plenty of men in uniform in the teashop: navy, RAF, army, Polish airmen who had joined the RAF, as well as the Free French and a good smattering of uniforms from the Dominions, especially Canada. Tilly tried to distract Dulcie from her anger by pointing this out.
‘Well, yes, there’s plenty that are standing by us, even them as don’t have to, like Wilder and the American Eagles.’
Tilly smiled and nodded, relieved when the waitress arrived with their tea and eggs on toast.
From his corner table tucked back against the wall, Drew was well placed to keep an eye on Tilly, even if she did have her back to him and even if the other girls
were mostly out of view. He had heard the row, though, and he had smiled to himself. Trust Dulcie to say things as she saw them. He glanced down at his newspaper, the
Evening Standard
, which was carrying yet more grainy photographs of the appalling desolation inflicted by the weekend’s bombs. Inside the paper were heart-rendingly graphic interviews with survivors of the Café de Paris bomb, but no more heart-rending and graphic than the interviews he himself had conducted. He had telegraphed some of them back to Chigaco for his father’s paper, but had received a curt wire back telling him that the American people did not want to read about such unpleasant things over their breakfasts and that in future Drew was to stick to heart-warming stories about the Brits in desperate need of the food parcels they were receiving from generous Americans to keep them from starving, and how grateful they were to America for that. If necessary he could send in articles about the incredible bravery of young American fly boys, but his father had warned him that his paper’s stance on the war was that it did not have and could not have anything to do with encouraging them. Too many good American lives had been sacrificed in the Great War for that.
Thinking of his father’s wire now, Drew swallowed back the acid taste of his own angry bile. He and his father thought so differently about so many things. There was no real closeness between them, no real father-and-son relationship. He looked again at Tilly. She was lucky to have the mother she had, and Drew was determined never to do anything that would damage that relationship or give Tilly cause to do anything impetuous that she might regret later on in her life. Love wasn’t just about
the couple who loved, it was about the past and the future – and the family they would create together.
He looked again at Tilly. The tension he had seen in her shoulders when he had first sat down had gone and he heard her laugh. A smile curled his own mouth. This get-together with the other girls would do her good.
‘Oh, Dulcie, do stop it,’ Tilly protested. ‘You’re making me laugh so much that my tummy hurts.’
All of them were in fact laughing at Dulcie’s clever imitation of a customer, who had come in to protest that her box of face powder had ‘leaked’ because the cardboard was of inferior quality and that because of that she wanted Selfridges to replace it with a new one.
‘The things they try on! Honestly, you’d have to see it to believe it. One of the other girls was telling me that they had one woman in with six pairs of nylons, all of them laddered, complaining that she’d bought them in ’39, and that now when she’d come to open the packets she’d found that they were all faulty. Rose, the salesgirl, told me that she recognised right off that they were American nylons, her having worked on the nylons counter for going on for ten years – and cheap ones at that – the kind that some of the merchant seamen bring back and that get sold on the market. Just imagine the cheek of the woman coming into Selfridges and trying to claim they was ours.’ A toss of Dulcie’s head accompanied her words.
They had all eaten every scrap of their eggs on toast, and their spotted dick, with its somewhat watery custard, as well as emptied two full pots of tea, and now it was time for them to leave; Sally for the hospital, where she was on night duty, and the other three for number 13,
Tilly deliberately slowing her walking pace so that she and Drew could trail slightly behind Agnes and Dulcie, so that she could have him to herself.
‘You look a lot more like my Tilly now than you did this morning,’ Drew told her.
‘I still can’t forget what happened on Saturday,’ Tilly admitted, smiling up at him as she added, ‘but somehow you can’t not laugh when Dulcie starts telling one of her tales.’